Hi, I’m Jeremy, I’m glad you’re here.
No matter what you create, I’m guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you’re building something that matters, but aren’t quite sure how to take the next step forward, I’d be honoured to have you join us.
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Directing Your Energy Wisely
Every weekday for the past six months, I’ve eaten a bowl of soup for lunch.
I like soup, but despite what the considerable streak might suggest, I’m not obsessed.
In reality, it’s a case of simple utility.
High-quality, premade soup is available at every store near me in a variety of flavours. It’s quick and easy to heat up, healthy, hearty, and delicious.
Over the months, the consistency of fare has introduced a sort of unintended ritual to the middle of my day.
At noon my alarm goes off, signaling the end of my morning deep work time block.
At this point , I head to the kitchen, pull the soup container out of the fridge, pour it into a bowl, and put the bowl into the microwave.
A minute and forty-five seconds. Take out and stir. Back in for another minute and thirty seconds.
During the first minute forty-five, I take the stairs up two floors of my coworking space to the bathroom.
During the second minute thirty, I wash out the soup container for recycling. It takes me forty-five seconds to wash the container, leaving me forty-five seconds to start my lunchtime sudoku.
As you can tell, I have the process down to a science.
Or at least I thought I did, until this past Wednesday.
A Surprising Discovery
I might not have made the discovery of I hadn’t been wearing my favourite shirt.
It’s a light grey, long-sleeved button-up, the perfect canvas for stray drops of the neon orange lentil curry I was heating up that day.
As such, I was on guard, fully aware of my every move as I placed the brimming bowl back in the microwave after it’s stir, set the timer for a minute thirty, and took the container to the sink to rinse out.
Had I been wearing any other shirt, I would have turned the hot water faucet on full, allowing the pressurized spray to blast the remaining soup from the inside of the container, splashing the sides of the sink in the process.
Once the container was clean, I would fill it up and use it to splash water across the sides and bottom of the sink until they were once again clean and white.
This had been a standard part of my lunch-time ritual to that point.
It seemed obvious to me that the full power of the faucet was the fastest and most effective way to clean out the container.
As my hand hovered over the handle, however, I hesitated.
I envisioned a neon wave splattering out out of the sink and across my shirt, ruining it in an instant.
Instead, I turned the tap slowly, drawing a thin, focused stream of water.
I carefully directed the stream around the sides of the container before—equally-carefully—pouring the contents directly into the drain, making sure to avoid even the slightest splash as I did so.
I tossed the container in the recycling, pleased with the potential disaster my careful planning had averted and looked over to the microwave timer.
Sixty seconds.
Huh.
Not only had I managed to keep my shirt clean, but I’d also taken less time to clean the container, hadn’t needed to clean the sink, and used less water to boot.
Was it a mistake? An outlier?
Being of scientific inclination, I tested the process again on Thursday, and then on Friday.
The results were the same.
Thirty seconds to wash the container under low pressure versus the forty-five under high.
How could this be? Surely less power, less energy, less input shouldn’t result in the same outcome in less time.
Should it?
Focus > Pressure
So often, our instinct is to devote all the energy we have available toward the problem we’re trying to solve or the work we’re trying to create.
Sometimes, this is called for, and may in fact be the best way to achieve our desired result.
But not always.
Especially if the energy we’re directing at the problem is unfocused, inconsistent, or erratic.
In fact, as with the soup container, sometimes more energy just creates more of a mess to clean up once we finish the task at hand.
In most cases, we’re better off beginning with less—but more focused—energy, and then ramping up as need be.
In my experience, brute force and maximum pressure are rarely the most efficient problem solving methods.
Just the right amount of energy, directed at just the right place, on the other hand, often is.
Which means the next time you find yourself wishing for more time, money, or force to direct toward a problem, it might be worth pausing.
Because there’s a good chance you already have all the resources you need. They’re just not being focused effectively.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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Hold Your Gaze Steady
There’s a decisive moment each and every time we catch the eye of another.
Whether it’s with our partner, best friend, parent, boss, student, or random person on the street, there’s the moment in which we must mutually decide where to go from here.
This moment, brief as it may be is loaded, filled with emotion, bias, and belief about who we each are as humans, both individually and in relation to each other.
In an instant, shame, interest, status, confidence, attraction, curiosity and more are calculated and the result of our internal equation determines what happens next.
Most often, either we or they avert our gaze, and we change topics or carry on our separate ways.
It’s uncomfortable to hold the gaze of another for longer than a passing glance. It feels like we’re putting our entire being on the line by doing so, opening ourselves up for judgment and ridicule.
Or maybe our fear is that the other, our partner in this experience, will see the true depths of our potential, and when the truth is laid bare between us, we’ll no longer be able to hide it away under the cover of rationalizations and excuses.
Holding gaze is a radical act, a declaration that we are worthy of being seen and acknowledged, that we won’t bow to the fear of judgment, that we are willing to open ourselves to vulnerability for the sake of creating something together that otherwise could not exist.
Often drowned out by our own racing thoughts and self-assessments in such a moment is the recognition that whatever thoughts we’re having, the person we’ve locked eyes with is surely having those same thoughts and doubts as well.
We forget that choosing to hold their gaze is as much about being willing to be seen as we are, as it is about being willing to see the other as they are.
Contained in the fraction of a second experience of catching and deciding whether or not to hold another person’s gaze is the entire existence of life as a creator.
Our entire goal as people looking to build an audience around the work we create is to catch the eye of others, to get our work in front of people where it can be seen and engaged with.
In the act of attempting to be seen, however, we inevitably must open our work, and ourselves, up to potential judgment and ridicule.
Much like catching the eye of someone as we pass them in the street, too often we avert our gaze, downplay our work, and withdraw our bid for attention rather than sit through the uncomfortable moment that precedes genuine connection.
If we want to connect, both personally, and through the work we create, we need to be willing to sit through the discomfort, to make the radical statement of holding our gaze steady and declaring that we and our work are worthy of the audience we find ourselves in front of.
In these encounters, we risk being sneered at, looked down on, and called out for our perceived audacity.
But with that risk, we also open ourselves up to being seen, challenged and encouraged to tap further into our best selves, to creating work that impacts and changes people, to see the others who are on this journey with us and find community and connection.
Our goal as creators and as marketers then, is not just to catch the eye of the people we’re seeking to engage with, but to be willing to sit through the initial discomfort and hold their gaze with vulnerability, authenticity, and bravery.
There is no connection without risk.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
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This Will Do, For Now
Nothing you ever create will be as good as you know it could be.
You might not possess the expertise, vision or resources to improve the work yourself further than it’s current state, but you — even if no one else is — are aware of the still-rough edges, the gaps, the deficiencies, and they’re the source of great distress.
Release it anyway.
This is why there are software updates, remastered albums and second edition books.
You’re challenge as a creator, someone striving to make a living by making a difference through their work, is to find the balance between creating something that is good enough to achieve the result you were shooting for when you set out, and getting it out the door.
In finding this balance, it’s essential to remember that you’re biased, influenced by your fear of what others will think if you release a half-baked, incomplete product that doesn’t do what you’ve promised it would.
The worst mistake at this point is to retreat further into your workshop and tinker to infinite, continually honing, perhaps even improving, but never releasing, never getting your work into the hands of the people it can help.
The antidote is to get feedback early and often. Bring aboard a small group of your intended audience and invite them into the process.
When you have the rough outline on paper, get feedback.
When you have the wireframe, get feedback.
When you have the prototype, get feedback.
When you have the beta version, get feedback.
When you feel like it might be getting close but just needs a few more tweaks, get feedback.
At this last point, it’s likely that you’ve reached the point where it’s time to release your Version 1, warts and all.
If you’re waiting for your to-do list on the project to finally reach zero, you’ll likely be waiting forever.
Even the very best first editions are released with a long list of improvements to be made. Nothing achieves perfection on the first try.
Your goal is not perfection. Your goal is to find the point where you can assess your work and say, “This will do, for now” and then release it to the wild.
If it resonates with your audience, you can get to work on Version 2, that same day if you want.
If it doesn’t, you’ve saved yourself the time and effort of tweaking something that was never going to land, and can get to work on something entirely new that might.
Best in the World?
There’s can only be one best in the world, and it had better be you.
Whether it’s your business, your podcast, your book, or anything else, if you’re not competing to be the single best in the world at what you do, why are you trying?
Of course, that’s a lot of pressure.
If there can only be one best in the world, to become that singular talent will no-doubt require you to forsake everything else in your life in pursuit of attaining that status, if you can even muster the motivation to start down the road against such odds in the first place.
But maybe Best in the World isn’t an absolute, objective title.
Maybe you can choose to redefine what you want to be best in the world at, and drill down until it becomes not only attainable but inevitable if you choose to focus single-mindedly on the niche you choose to carve out for yourself.
Think about the best swimmer in the world.
Chances are your brain immediately jumped to Michael Phelps, and for good reason. He’s not only the most decorated international swimmer of all time but the most decorated Olympian of any kind.
But if you look at his finishing results, you’ll see that while he was flat out dominant in some categories of races, he failed to medal in some, and didn’t even compete in others.
While Phelps might be the hands-down best in the world at the 200m butterfly, he’s not even in the conversation for the 400m freestyle, in which his best international placement was 18th.
And this is all in the pool. What about open water, endurance swimming?
Depending on your worldview and the boundaries and criteria you use to judge a given pursuit, there are many potential Bests in the World.
This is an exciting proposition.
Instead of competing against everyone else in the world who does the same thing you do, you can choose to narrow your focus on who you serve, and thus thin out your competition.
Narrow your focus far enough and you may find yourself as the only one choosing to compete to be the Best in the World for those people.
Narrowing Your Focus
Of course, being the Best in the World at something for which people are unwilling to pay for, or which lacks an audience big enough to support you, Seth Godin’s Minimum Viable Audience, doesn’t do you any good if you’re hoping to support yourself based on your work.
But narrowing down your focus to the point at which you have the ability to conceivably become the Best in the World at a certain pursuit, to a certain group of people is the starting point for creating something worth talking about.
As you drill down you might find a point at which you are already the Best in the World. If this audience meets the Minimum Viable Audience, your job is to double down on them and get the word out that you exist specifically to serve them.
If they don’t meet the Minimum Viable Audience, you’ll need to expand your focus outward, degree by degree until you find an audience that does meet that threshold.
You may no longer be a Best in the World front runner at this point, but if you’re willing to put in the work, you probably can be.
Incumbent Bests in the World in many niches are often generic, mass-market providers only claiming the top spot in that niche because no one has yet come along and spoken to that specific group of people directly and intimately.
This is your opportunity.
You Get to Choose Your Competition
Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you not only to which audience, but also to which worldviews and for what criteria you choose to compete to be the Best in the World on. The easier a given criterion is to do well, the more competition there will be to become the best.
Better to compete on criteria that are truly difficult to excel at. They’ll take more work from you to develop, but you’ll have less competition once you make it to the top.
In the podcast production business, the world we at Counterweight Creative operate in, there are dozens of companies and hundreds if not thousands of freelancers for us to compete against.
We certainly can’t compete on price with freelance audio editors from India or the Philipines.
We could potentially build a team to attempt to compete with the likes of Gimlet Media, producers of big-budget shows for brands like Microsoft, Adobe, WeWork, and more. But the stress, effort, and uncertainty of that shift in focus aren’t of interest to me or our team.
We choose to compete in the broad market of entrepreneurs and businesses using podcasts to grow their authority and fill their pipelines, but this is still a massive market (and getting bigger), one in which it would be difficult to be the best in the world.
Within that market, we choose to work specifically with up and coming health and wellness entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their exposure. Even within this shrinking niche, there are multiple criteria we could choose to compete on.
The obvious choice is to compete to deliver the best finished audio quality, but we’re not interested in that.
What Criteria Will You Compete On?
For production teams like ours which are made up of trained sound engineers, more than acceptable audio quality is easy to achieve. Thus, it’s hard to be the best, with so many competitors eager to focus the entirety of their efforts on achieving top spot (whatever that is…).
We’re happy to settle on delivering podcasts that are better quality than 95% of other shows, but past that the added effort only results in diminishing returns.
We would rather choose to compete in areas that are harder to deliver on, and thus draw fewer competitors, but also bring more value to our clients.
We choose to compete on crafting a strategy for our clients that doesn’t just produce quality podcasts, but uses podcasting as a driver for their entire marketing strategy, and brings in a steady stream of leads while growing their visibility and authority in the areas they’re choosing to compete in.
We choose to compete on providing the best customer experience to the people we work with. By being the easiest and most streamlined to work with, and providing a client experience that leaves them changed, and raises the bar for what they expect from every other service provider they interact with.
We choose to compete on building the best team culture, one that leaves our team members better when they leave than they were when they joined. We want to develop, empower and equip our team members to be better in every area of their life for having been a part of our team.
We choose to compete on caring more for our people, team, clients and partners alike than anyone else.
None of these are easy, we don’t always deliver on them consistently, but they’re doable, and when combined, I think they provide a focal area that we can be the Best in the World at.
What about you? What is the focal area in which you can compete to Best in the World?
Some Lessons You Have to Earn
Money can buy you a lot of knowledge.
Books, university tuition, online courses, coaching and consulting can all help you level up your expertise, add to your knowledge of almost any topic you can imagine and, almost always, cost money.
There’s a lot to be said for the type of knowledge that can be bought. It’s often tactical, useful and laid out in such a way that makes it easy to understand and process.
You might choose to learn about effective communication techniques, marketing strategy, team culture building, or a step by step guide of how to use podcasting to elevate your authority in your space. This type of education is essential to leveling up and improving yourself, your work, and your business.
But this type of education can only get so far before you top out.
There’s another type of education, one that can’t be bought, and can only be earned, painfully, but is required if you want to achieve your potential and create work at the level you’re truly capable of.
This is emotional education.
Emotional education comes from facing down The Hard Stuff along the journey and coming up short. From putting your heart and soul and everything you believe into creating something that fails.
It consists of vulnerability and shame and hopelessness and a profound loss of faith that you have what it takes to make the change you are seeking to make, to connect meaningfully with the people you are seeking to serve.
These lessons will test you like you’ve never been tested and expose you to the world at your most raw. It’s no wonder that many in this situation choose to pack it in, cutting the lesson short to avoid the discomfort, fear, and pain.
But while a course in emotional education might take you to your lowest, if you can summon the courage, strength and resolve to push through and come out the other side, you’ll have earned a lesson that is exceedingly rare.
To face down shame, judgment, and hopelessness, to encountered yourself at your lowest, but continue onward is to move a step closer to creative invincibility.
When you poured everything you had into your work the first time around, you didn’t know the abyss that lay on the other side should you come up short. But knowing that abyss, having ventured through it, and choosing to pick yourself up and create again knowing that you very well might find yourself back there again by doing so?
This is the bravest of creative acts.
No book, class or instructor can teach you this courage. A wise mentor may encourage you to start and continue down the path, but in the end you must be the one to do the work, take the leap and reap both the rewards and consequences.
You may have achieved success without facing down The Hard Stuff, without journeying through the abyss. But if so, it’s likely you haven’t tapped into your deepest potential, and unlocked your greatest ability to make work that means something.
If you’re in the abyss now, keep moving, pushing, creating, even when it feels pointless. Your abyss might take months, years, or decades to work through, but the strength you’ll find on the other side is equal to the trial.
The abyss is the only place to find the strength required to come back and create something that truly matters. The greatest mistake you can make is to avoid it.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
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Belief Is Not Enough to Succeed
There’s a pernicious bit of advice that floats around the world of creative business. You commonly hear it in blogs, on podcast interviews with successful creative business owners, and from the stage at conferences.
It’s used to address podcasters, designers, photographers, videographers and pretty much any other type of freelancer or creative you can imagine.
But ubiquity does make it any truer.
The advice goes something like this: “If you have a dream that you truly believe in, that you’re deeply passionate about, and you work hard enough at it, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
But There’s a Problem Here
I think the problem stems from the fact that most of the people who are in a position to give this advice are currently living a life and excelling at a career that was once their own impossible dream. But they continued dreaming, made a plan and worked hard, and in the end, they realized it.
The thing is that they got lucky, on multiple fronts.
No doubt that they benefited from any combination of timing, existing skills, personal disposition and approach to facing challenges, their network and any host of other small but crucial opportunities, privileges, and chance that helped them achieve their goal.
But their biggest stroke of luck of all was the fact that their dream fit into an existing economic model.
Imagine you dreamed of working for yourself as a freelance graphic designer.
Especially if you didn’t go to design school, working for yourself, as a creative no less, might seem like an impossible dream.
You may not know any designers or even any freelancers personally, your family and friends might discourage you from taking the unnecessary risk of going into business for yourself, and let’s not even get into the imposter syndrome as someone who didn’t go to design school…
But at the same time, design is a thoroughly established profession with a deep pool of potential clients, educational resources, marketplaces to connect designers with clients, communities and associations to meet other designers, and on and on and on.
If your impossible dream was to work for yourself as a designer, you picked a pretty good impossible dream, and an entirely achievable one.
My Impossible Dream of World Travel
Five years ago when I first got started in business, I too had a very convenient “impossible dream”.
My dream was to start a business that would allow me to travel full-time and work from anywhere in the world.
Going in, I assumed that this might take five years to achieve, maybe even longer, and I was willing to work for it.
But a whole spate of fortuitous circumstances outside my control, including the rise of online business in general, podcasting in specific, and my latent audio engineering expertise (I was working full time as a landscaper at the time) meant that I was able to quickly tap into a fast-growing market and within nine months had achieved the goal I thought would take years to realize.
Not All Impossible Dreams Are Created Equal
Say for example that my dream, my one true calling, finally emerged in my mid-twenties to become a professional hockey player. If I began taking action immediately, I would be into my forties by the time I had caught up in experience-level to other players who were also competing to join the professional ranks, not to mention they would be entering their peak physical state, and I would be well into my own decline.
No matter how hard I dreamed or how hard I worked over that span, there is simply no way that I would or will ever become a pro hockey player.
I’ll admit, that’s an extreme example, so let’s look at one that’s much more common, and one that I see on an almost daily basis in the world of podcasting.
Can I Make a Living From My Podcast?
The podcast world is currently exploding. Every year sees more podcasts starting up, more big brands invest in the medium, and more advertising dollars pouring in.
As a result, a lot of people, including myself and our team at Counterweight Creative are currently benefiting from being in the industry.
When it comes to podcasters themselves, as you might imagine, most of that incoming capital is being focused on the existing big players, the NPRs and existing media companies of the world, as well as the up and coming first-movers in the space.
That said, there are thousands of indie podcasters who have managed to leverage their podcasts to do extremely well for themselves by building a raving fanbase and then creating products and services for that fanbase. This is what our team helps podcasters do.
But to say that all podcasters will or even can benefit from the explosion of the industry is to fall back into the same lie we kicked this article off with.
What most indie podcasters, bloggers and YouTubers don’t understand is that no matter how hard you work or how deeply you believe in your content, unless it is something that provides tangible value to a sufficient sized audience, you will not be able to make a living creating that content.
Your Niche Matters
We all have dreams of some form or another, and I believe that more often than not, it’s worth pursuing those dreams, even if we don’t always realize them.
While I believe deeply that there is joy and value in the journey of pursuing a dream, the danger is that you end up spending more time, money and heartbreak than you were willing to spend on a dream that was never viable from the start.
Yes realizing a dream requires commitment, belief, and hard work. But that’s not all it takes.
More often ignored by dreamers is the requirement of a receptive audience who understands what you’re doing and how it will benefit them to engage with your work.
This requirement often means you need some flexibility and compromise when it comes to what your dream scenario looks like in real life.
If your dream is to make a living podcasting, you have a pretty good chance of doing that if you put the work in.
Do some research to find an underserved niche, spend the next 6–12 months learning everything you can about it, and create a podcast teaching people what they want to know about the topic and create products and services that go more in-depth.
It wouldn’t be easy, it would take a lot of work, but there’s a well-trod path leading you there.
If, on the other hand, your dream is to make a living podcasting about your fascination with the lost artistic medium of linoleum flooring, you might have a much harder time building much of an audience, let alone monetizing your show…
No matter how excited you are linoleum, the world has moved on, and it’s unlikely you’re going to realize your dream.
Quality Matters
But let’s say your dream fits into a niche that does have an existing precedent for making a living off of it. In keeping with podcasting let’s say you want to start a comedy show with your friends.
There are certainly comedy podcasters out there that do really well for themselves, so you’ve ticked the first box.
But just because some people make a living creating the same thing you want to create, doesn’t mean that you are entitled to as well.
In the end, no matter how funny you and your friends think you are, that’s not what matters if your goal is to make a living creating your show.
For that to happen, your show needs to resonate with enough other people in such a way that you build a loyal audience around your work that has the potential to support you either by buying your products or by attracting advertisers.
This is what Seth Godin refers to as the smallest viable audience.
No matter how great your show might be either subjectively or even objectively, if the people who engage with it are unwilling to talk about it, share it with their friends, or engage further than an occasional listen, it’s either not good enough in terms of quality, or it is, but it’s not commercially viable content.
If this is the case, you have a couple options.
Resolving the Disconnects
If quality is the issue, you can put in the work to improve it. We’ve all heard the stories of the comedians who did three shows a night every weekend when they were starting out, playing hundreds of shows to near-empty rooms over the course of years before finally breaking through.
Have you put that kind of work into developing your craft?
There is so much competition in so many niches, industries, and professions that exceptional work is a requirement to even enter the conversation.
In addition to developing your skills, creatives often massively undervalue the importance of taking a proactive approach to networking, meeting the right people who are in a position to help mentor, guide, or otherwise aide on the road to realizing their dream.
Have you put in that kind of work?
For most people, achieving a dream is something that takes years of invested time to get to a level where it becomes a viable way to make a living. If you haven’t put in your time already, this should be your number one focus.
If quality is not the issue, but commercial viability is, you have the option of shifting your content to better fit into an existing commercial framework, one that potentially already has an audience that you can tap into.
The content you create or the work you perform for this audience might not be what you initially dreamt of doing, but maybe the trade-off is worth it to you.
When I first set out to start a business that would allow me to travel, I wanted to be a photography blogger. That didn’t end up working out for me, but something else came along that did, and I happily jumped at the opportunity.
The narrower your dream and the less compromise you’re willing to make, the harder it will be to achieve, if it’s possible at all.
A Third Option
Aside from putting in years of work to perfect your craft, and changing the nature of your work to better meet the market where it’s at, there is a third option when the work you care deeply about is not achieving the commercial success you hoped for.
You could decide that the work you create doesn’t need to achieve recognition, commercial success, or support you in order for it to fulfill you on a deeper level.
You could do your podcast about linoleum flooring simply because you find it fascinating, even if no one else does, and the podcast allows you to think about and appreciate it more deeply.
You could get together with your friends once a week and record your comedy podcast because it’s fun and allows you to share the experience of creating something with the people you care about. That in itself is such a rare and rich human experience that it should be cherished for what it is, rather than be a source of frustration for what it is not.
I could accept the fact that I’ll never play in the NHL and play pick-up hockey simply for the joy of connecting with other people in a friendly competition, and feeling of the magic of gliding effortlessly across the ice on a warm winter day out in the sun at the local rink.
No matter how hard you believe, and how hard you work, the world does not owe it to you to fulfill your dream. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take something deeply meaningful away from the pursuit in itself.
Is Your Work Really Good Enough?
You might have heard the rule that you need to put equal time into promoting and marketing your work as you do creating it.
Unless some incredible stroke of luck befalls you, no matter how good your work, podcast, book, or business is, you must be the one to exert the time and effort of getting it in front of the people it was created to help.
Like many creators, you might agree to this rule but not understand what effective marketing actually looks like, where you should be focusing your time and energy in promoting you work, and how you should best go about building authentic relationships and an audience around what you create.
You might have dabbled in promoting your work across a dozen different social media platforms, maybe guested on some podcasts, and even experimented with paid advertising, but never been able to see that effort translate into more podcast downloads, more blog page views, or more sales of your offer.
If you believe in your work and the content or offer you’ve created, you might come to the conclusion that your messaging or social media strategy is off, that if you could afford to spend thousands of dollars on ad experts, copywriters, and social media marketing managers your offer would surely take off.
While it might be true that your messaging is off, your copywriting is poor, and you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to paid advertising, before committing to spend your way to success (which probably won’t happen), you must first address the root of your marketing and ask yourself:
“Is my work really good enough?”
Assessing Your Offer
Too many people create something they’re in love with and assume that everyone else around them will see just as much value in it as they do.
They get it in front of ten, fifty, maybe a hundred people who should be interested in it, and when they’re met with muted response, assume that these people just don’t understand it yet, or that it’s a numbers game, and they simply must get their work in front of a greater pool of people.
Here’s the thing.
If you’ve presented your product, service, podcast, book, or offer of any other kind to ten people who you felt were the ideal target audience for that offer and not one had more than a passing interest in it, that’s a major problem.
If you’ve got your offer in front of a hundred people with the same result, you can be 99.9% certain, that no, your work is not, in fact, good enough.
Work that is at the level it truly needs to be at gets people talking about it without your prompt. They share it with friends who might benefit from it as well, they take the initiative of posting about it on social media.
Work that is good enough will spread on its own if you give it enough time, and marketing should only serve to accelerate the spread of a product or idea that is already proven to be worth your chosen audience talking about.
If you don’t have an offer worth talking about yet, that’s ok, it’s part of the process.
The products, services, and creations that are talked about most were engineered, sculpted and honed into what they are now based on constant feedback and iteration.
Your work should be no different.
If you’ve created something that’s not worth talking about, you’re on the right track. You’ve completed the initial brain dump, which can often be the hardest part.
If you believe in your offer, now is the time to experiment, tweak, cut away, add on, and constantly be asking for feedback from a core group of people for whom your work is intended to serve.
It can be scary asking for honest feedback from a small group of people. Marketing to the anonymous masses can be a way to shield yourself from the emotional labour involved with looking someone in the eye, presenting your creation, and being told that nope, sorry, I don’t see anything special here.
But if you’re going to build something that spreads, something that impacts and maybe even changes people, the only way is to find those first ten people and create something that is worth them talking about.
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Find Your First Ten Fans
You have a big goal, a vision for how to make life better for a specific group of people.
That vision might be a refinement or improvement on the way things are currently done or a complete uprooting of the existing systems, structures, and beliefs of the people you’re looking to engage with.
Either way, it’s clear to you, at least, that your solution is the obvious choice to solve your audience’s problem, and you want to see your vision implemented on a massive scale for everyone your offer has the potential to help.
But how to get their attention and spread the word?
Your instinct is to get your hands on the biggest megaphone you can find and shout your message to the masses, confident that once your message is heard a queue of eager buyers will form engage with your offer, and a movement will be born.
Movements, however, are not built on megaphones, mass-marketing, and top-down messaging.
Movements are built by speaking intimately to a small group of people, and then creating something for them specifically, that they can’t help but tell their friends about.
If you choose to follow this path, the starting point is simple.
Find one person.
Find one person for whom your offer is the perfect solution for. If you can’t find one person, you most certainly won’t find a hundred, or a thousand, or a million.
Once you’ve found your one person, hone your product or service until it is the best possible solution for the problem they’re trying to solve.
Then find ten people and repeat the process.
Hone your work until you have something truly worth talking about, something that each of your ten people can’t help but share with three of their friends.
You don’t need to get your message, your product, your service in front of a million people. You simply need to find the perfect ten who will help you get the snowball rolling.
You won’t win by shouting louder than everyone else. You’ll win by creating raving fans who whisper among themselves and do your marketing for you.
Maintaining Motivation
If your goals are of sufficient depth and scale, measuring our progress towards them on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis can be difficult.
As a result, even if you are moving slowly, steadily, consistently forward, it can feel as though you’re stuck in place, motionless.
Starting a new business for the first time, doubling your existing business, or creating work that authentically moves people can feel like monumental tasks that don’t always have a clear roadmap.
Without a map, any forward motion you do have often feels like it might just be taking you in circles, not moving you any closer to your goal.
In these cases, it might be worth starting a “Success Journal”.
When you commit to writing down every success, every win, no matter how big or how small, the proof of your progress, slow though it may be, becomes apparent.
Momentum is essential to maintaining motivation, especially through The Dips that come with any project worth pursuing.
You might make note of each new best-yet daily page view total on your website, or downloads on your podcast.
You might note down every new email list subscriber, or keep a running tally of your social media following.
If you have a product or service you might note every sale or new customer.
Or, maybe you note every kind comment from someone who interacted with your work and appreciated it. Every connection your work facilitated, each new and fascinating person you would have never met if not for the work you did.
Over time, it might feel tedious to track each and every new subscriber, sale, or customer.
When that happens, recalibrate what it is you’re tracking and realize that this is as sure a sign as any that you’re on the right track, moving forward, building momentum.
Resistance and your brain’s negativity bias will do everything they can to keep you in place, feeling like the work is not worth doing, that it would be a waste of time to show up any bigger than you already are.
It’s up to you to stack the deck in your favour, to build up your armour, and to remind yourself that what you do has value, is connecting with people, and you have the proof.
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Care More
There are days when you feel like giving up.
Days when the pain of caring so much about the work you do, work that isn’t landing, isn’t connecting, isn’t making a difference, leaves you wanting to care less.
You feel that the hard days would be a little less hard if you didn’t take it all so personally.
That the criticism, and worse, the non-reaction would be a little easier to swallow if you didn’t have so much of yourself wrapped up in the work.
Into it, you’ve poured your time, labour, pain, hope, heart, soul, and shimmering belief for what the world could be.
Your work is the sum of your very best self, and when it fails to connect with someone, maybe with anyone, you’re left wondering what that says about you.
So yes, it might be easier, and less painful to pull back, to care less, and if you’re looking for an easy life, maybe that’s the best option.
But if you’re looking to make work that connects with, interacts with, and changes people — and I think you are — the easy road is not the one that will take you where you’re looking to go.
More than your time, labour, pain, hope, heart, soul and belief, your care is the biggest investment you can make in your work.
Without care, it all falls flat.
Rather than pull back when the pain of caring about work that isn’t connecting is almost too much, ask, “How can I care even more? What have I been holding back?”
Lean into and through the pain.
It means you’re onto something.
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How We Do Things Around Here
Inspired by a recent blog post by Seth Godin, How we do things around here, I wanted to brainstorm and define the principals that guide how we at Counterweight Creative work, and interact with both clients and among our team.
Big thanks to Seth as always for his generosity and inspiration, I’d highly recommend checking out his original post.
We build everything we do on the foundation of kindness.
We believe treating people with empathy, dignity, and respect is essential to creating exceptional work over the long run. If the two ever conflict, we will side with treating people like humans.
If we had to choose between being known for doing the best work in our field and being the best people in our field, we’d choose the second. Luckily, being better people creates better work.
We communicate with openness and vulnerability.
We believe in radical ownership and will take personal accountability when things don’t go as planned.
We are generous with our praise.
We share our knowledge freely.
We will ask for help if we’re unclear, overwhelmed, or incapable for any reason.
If we don’t know, we’ll say so.
We don’t cast blame when something fails. Instead, we ask “why did this happen?” and “what can we do to ensure this doesn’t happen again?”
We give the benefit of the doubt.
We always answer emails to each other within a day, even if it’s just to say ‘got it’.
We pay invoices before they’re due.
We don’t miss deadlines.
We agree that all of our interactions are off the record, unless we agree otherwise.
We don’t use legalese, jargon, tricks or loopholes in our agreements. Instead, we’ll be as clear as we can and honour what we said, and expect that you’ll do the same.
We are intentional and specific about our work, and don’t do for the sake of doing. “Who is it for”, “what is it for?”, and “why are we doing it?” are the questions that guide our work.
If it’s not working, we’ll say so, and do it with specificity and kindness.
We are constantly learning and improving ourselves and the work we do.
We recognize that the work is important, but understand that the people involved in it are more important.
We expect a lot from our clients and our team, but expect more from ourselves.
We charge a lot but expect to deliver more than we are paid for.
We expect to fall short of these principals at times but we will always maintain them as our guide.
This is the first draft of what I’m sure will be an ever-evolving list. I’d love to see what principals are guiding the work you do, so please reach out and share!
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Creative Wayfinding For Ambitious Optimists.
Creating Inevitable Outcomes
The word “Inevitable” seems to most often be used to describe some slow backward slide toward a negative outcome.
“It was inevitable they would get divorced at some point.”
“With his work ethic, it was inevitable that he would be one of the first to be laid off.”
“The project was ill-conceived from the start, it was inevitable that it would fall flat.”
When thinking about the inevitability our actions have the potential to create, the idea that we might create a system for living that inevitability leads to success seems almost laughable.
But I don’t think it is.
As surely as consistently making certain decisions will lead to failure, I’m convinced that consistently making other decisions are certain to lead us to success if we’re willing to stick with them long enough.
No doubt there will be variations in the specifics of those actions and decisions depending on what it is you’re pursuing, but I think the following list is a good starting point.
Regular Practices to Create the Inevitability of Success
- Meet new people, especially those with diverse backgrounds doing diverse, interesting things.
- Experiment.
- Make note of your behaviour, thought patterns, and the reasoning behind them.
- Ask for help.
- Find a mentor.
- Join a mastermind group.
- Do a brain dump.
- Write down the problem you’re stuck on, on one side of a cue card, on the other side write, “Solution:” Now solve.
- Go for a walk.
- Reflect on your goals and where you’re currently at regarding them.
- Ask “Why?”
- Focus on habits.
- Do it poorly until it improves.
- Be more generous than you want to be.
- Have vulnerable conversations.
- Unplug.
- Be honest with yourself.
- Reach out to people you want to connect/reconnect with. Potential clients, customers, collaborators, mentors, friends, etc.
- Commit time to thinking.
- Commit time to doing.
- Create consistently.
- Identify the edges of your comfort zone. Then push.
- Say “I don’t know.”
- Follow your curiosity.
- Quit what isn’t working for or serving you.
- Take the long view.
- Acknowledge your privilege. Use it to empower others.
- Act with intention.
- Eat the frog.
- Be kind. To others and yourself.
This is only the start of what I’m sure will be a growing list.
What habits, actions or decisions do you make to lead to inevitable success over time?
Hold Your Gaze Steady
There’s a decisive moment each and every time we catch the eye of another.
Whether it’s with our partner, best friend, parent, boss, student, or random person on the street, there’s the moment in which we must mutually decide where to go from here.
This moment, brief as it may be is loaded, filled with emotion, bias, and belief about who we each are as humans, both individually and in relation to each other.
In an instant, shame, interest, status, confidence, attraction, curiosity and more are calculated and the result of our internal equation determines what happens next.
Most often, either we or they avert our gaze, and we change topics or carry on our separate ways.
It’s uncomfortable to hold the gaze of another for longer than a passing glance. It feels like we’re putting our entire being on the line by doing so, opening ourselves up for judgment and ridicule.
Or maybe our fear is that the other, our partner in this experience, will see the true depths of our potential, and when the truth is laid bare between us, we’ll no longer be able to hide it away under the cover of rationalizations and excuses.
Holding gaze is a radical act, a declaration that we are worthy of being seen and acknowledged, that we won’t bow to the fear of judgment, that we are willing to open ourselves to vulnerability for the sake of creating something together that otherwise could not exist.
Often drowned out by our own racing thoughts and self-assessments in such a moment is the recognition that whatever thoughts we’re having, the person we’ve locked eyes with is surely having those same thoughts and doubts as well.
We forget that choosing to hold their gaze is as much about being willing to be seen as we are, as it is about being willing to see the other as they are.
Contained in the fraction of a second experience of catching and deciding whether or not to hold another person’s gaze is the entire existence of life as a creator.
Our entire goal as people looking to build an audience around the work we create is to catch the eye of others, to get our work in front of people where it can be seen and engaged with.
In the act of attempting to be seen, however, we inevitably must open our work, and ourselves, up to potential judgment and ridicule.
Much like catching the eye of someone as we pass them in the street, too often we avert our gaze, downplay our work, and withdraw our bid for attention rather than sit through the uncomfortable moment that precedes genuine connection.
If we want to connect, both personally, and through the work we create, we need to be willing to sit through the discomfort, to make the radical statement of holding our gaze steady and declaring that we and our work are worthy of the audience we find ourselves in front of.
In these encounters, we risk being sneered at, looked down on, and called out for our perceived audacity.
But with that risk, we also open ourselves up to being seen, challenged and encouraged to tap further into our best selves, to creating work that impacts and changes people, to see the others who are on this journey with us and find community and connection.
Our goal as creators and as marketers then, is not just to catch the eye of the people we’re seeking to engage with, but to be willing to sit through the initial discomfort and hold their gaze with vulnerability, authenticity, and bravery.
There is no connection without risk.
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This Will Do, For Now
Nothing you ever create will be as good as you know it could be.
You might not possess the expertise, vision or resources to improve the work yourself further than it’s current state, but you — even if no one else is — are aware of the still-rough edges, the gaps, the deficiencies, and they’re the source of great distress.
Release it anyway.
This is why there are software updates, remastered albums and second edition books.
You’re challenge as a creator, someone striving to make a living by making a difference through their work, is to find the balance between creating something that is good enough to achieve the result you were shooting for when you set out, and getting it out the door.
In finding this balance, it’s essential to remember that you’re biased, influenced by your fear of what others will think if you release a half-baked, incomplete product that doesn’t do what you’ve promised it would.
The worst mistake at this point is to retreat further into your workshop and tinker to infinite, continually honing, perhaps even improving, but never releasing, never getting your work into the hands of the people it can help.
The antidote is to get feedback early and often. Bring aboard a small group of your intended audience and invite them into the process.
When you have the rough outline on paper, get feedback.
When you have the wireframe, get feedback.
When you have the prototype, get feedback.
When you have the beta version, get feedback.
When you feel like it might be getting close but just needs a few more tweaks, get feedback.
At this last point, it’s likely that you’ve reached the point where it’s time to release your Version 1, warts and all.
If you’re waiting for your to-do list on the project to finally reach zero, you’ll likely be waiting forever.
Even the very best first editions are released with a long list of improvements to be made. Nothing achieves perfection on the first try.
Your goal is not perfection. Your goal is to find the point where you can assess your work and say, “This will do, for now” and then release it to the wild.
If it resonates with your audience, you can get to work on Version 2, that same day if you want.
If it doesn’t, you’ve saved yourself the time and effort of tweaking something that was never going to land, and can get to work on something entirely new that might.
Best in the World?
There’s can only be one best in the world, and it had better be you.
Whether it’s your business, your podcast, your book, or anything else, if you’re not competing to be the single best in the world at what you do, why are you trying?
Of course, that’s a lot of pressure.
If there can only be one best in the world, to become that singular talent will no-doubt require you to forsake everything else in your life in pursuit of attaining that status, if you can even muster the motivation to start down the road against such odds in the first place.
But maybe Best in the World isn’t an absolute, objective title.
Maybe you can choose to redefine what you want to be best in the world at, and drill down until it becomes not only attainable but inevitable if you choose to focus single-mindedly on the niche you choose to carve out for yourself.
Think about the best swimmer in the world.
Chances are your brain immediately jumped to Michael Phelps, and for good reason. He’s not only the most decorated international swimmer of all time but the most decorated Olympian of any kind.
But if you look at his finishing results, you’ll see that while he was flat out dominant in some categories of races, he failed to medal in some, and didn’t even compete in others.
While Phelps might be the hands-down best in the world at the 200m butterfly, he’s not even in the conversation for the 400m freestyle, in which his best international placement was 18th.
And this is all in the pool. What about open water, endurance swimming?
Depending on your worldview and the boundaries and criteria you use to judge a given pursuit, there are many potential Bests in the World.
This is an exciting proposition.
Instead of competing against everyone else in the world who does the same thing you do, you can choose to narrow your focus on who you serve, and thus thin out your competition.
Narrow your focus far enough and you may find yourself as the only one choosing to compete to be the Best in the World for those people.
Narrowing Your Focus
Of course, being the Best in the World at something for which people are unwilling to pay for, or which lacks an audience big enough to support you, Seth Godin’s Minimum Viable Audience, doesn’t do you any good if you’re hoping to support yourself based on your work.
But narrowing down your focus to the point at which you have the ability to conceivably become the Best in the World at a certain pursuit, to a certain group of people is the starting point for creating something worth talking about.
As you drill down you might find a point at which you are already the Best in the World. If this audience meets the Minimum Viable Audience, your job is to double down on them and get the word out that you exist specifically to serve them.
If they don’t meet the Minimum Viable Audience, you’ll need to expand your focus outward, degree by degree until you find an audience that does meet that threshold.
You may no longer be a Best in the World front runner at this point, but if you’re willing to put in the work, you probably can be.
Incumbent Bests in the World in many niches are often generic, mass-market providers only claiming the top spot in that niche because no one has yet come along and spoken to that specific group of people directly and intimately.
This is your opportunity.
You Get to Choose Your Competition
Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you not only to which audience, but also to which worldviews and for what criteria you choose to compete to be the Best in the World on. The easier a given criterion is to do well, the more competition there will be to become the best.
Better to compete on criteria that are truly difficult to excel at. They’ll take more work from you to develop, but you’ll have less competition once you make it to the top.
In the podcast production business, the world we at Counterweight Creative operate in, there are dozens of companies and hundreds if not thousands of freelancers for us to compete against.
We certainly can’t compete on price with freelance audio editors from India or the Philipines.
We could potentially build a team to attempt to compete with the likes of Gimlet Media, producers of big-budget shows for brands like Microsoft, Adobe, WeWork, and more. But the stress, effort, and uncertainty of that shift in focus aren’t of interest to me or our team.
We choose to compete in the broad market of entrepreneurs and businesses using podcasts to grow their authority and fill their pipelines, but this is still a massive market (and getting bigger), one in which it would be difficult to be the best in the world.
Within that market, we choose to work specifically with up and coming health and wellness entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their exposure. Even within this shrinking niche, there are multiple criteria we could choose to compete on.
The obvious choice is to compete to deliver the best finished audio quality, but we’re not interested in that.
What Criteria Will You Compete On?
For production teams like ours which are made up of trained sound engineers, more than acceptable audio quality is easy to achieve. Thus, it’s hard to be the best, with so many competitors eager to focus the entirety of their efforts on achieving top spot (whatever that is…).
We’re happy to settle on delivering podcasts that are better quality than 95% of other shows, but past that the added effort only results in diminishing returns.
We would rather choose to compete in areas that are harder to deliver on, and thus draw fewer competitors, but also bring more value to our clients.
We choose to compete on crafting a strategy for our clients that doesn’t just produce quality podcasts, but uses podcasting as a driver for their entire marketing strategy, and brings in a steady stream of leads while growing their visibility and authority in the areas they’re choosing to compete in.
We choose to compete on providing the best customer experience to the people we work with. By being the easiest and most streamlined to work with, and providing a client experience that leaves them changed, and raises the bar for what they expect from every other service provider they interact with.
We choose to compete on building the best team culture, one that leaves our team members better when they leave than they were when they joined. We want to develop, empower and equip our team members to be better in every area of their life for having been a part of our team.
We choose to compete on caring more for our people, team, clients and partners alike than anyone else.
None of these are easy, we don’t always deliver on them consistently, but they’re doable, and when combined, I think they provide a focal area that we can be the Best in the World at.
What about you? What is the focal area in which you can compete to Best in the World?
Some Lessons You Have to Earn
Money can buy you a lot of knowledge.
Books, university tuition, online courses, coaching and consulting can all help you level up your expertise, add to your knowledge of almost any topic you can imagine and, almost always, cost money.
There’s a lot to be said for the type of knowledge that can be bought. It’s often tactical, useful and laid out in such a way that makes it easy to understand and process.
You might choose to learn about effective communication techniques, marketing strategy, team culture building, or a step by step guide of how to use podcasting to elevate your authority in your space. This type of education is essential to leveling up and improving yourself, your work, and your business.
But this type of education can only get so far before you top out.
There’s another type of education, one that can’t be bought, and can only be earned, painfully, but is required if you want to achieve your potential and create work at the level you’re truly capable of.
This is emotional education.
Emotional education comes from facing down The Hard Stuff along the journey and coming up short. From putting your heart and soul and everything you believe into creating something that fails.
It consists of vulnerability and shame and hopelessness and a profound loss of faith that you have what it takes to make the change you are seeking to make, to connect meaningfully with the people you are seeking to serve.
These lessons will test you like you’ve never been tested and expose you to the world at your most raw. It’s no wonder that many in this situation choose to pack it in, cutting the lesson short to avoid the discomfort, fear, and pain.
But while a course in emotional education might take you to your lowest, if you can summon the courage, strength and resolve to push through and come out the other side, you’ll have earned a lesson that is exceedingly rare.
To face down shame, judgment, and hopelessness, to encountered yourself at your lowest, but continue onward is to move a step closer to creative invincibility.
When you poured everything you had into your work the first time around, you didn’t know the abyss that lay on the other side should you come up short. But knowing that abyss, having ventured through it, and choosing to pick yourself up and create again knowing that you very well might find yourself back there again by doing so?
This is the bravest of creative acts.
No book, class or instructor can teach you this courage. A wise mentor may encourage you to start and continue down the path, but in the end you must be the one to do the work, take the leap and reap both the rewards and consequences.
You may have achieved success without facing down The Hard Stuff, without journeying through the abyss. But if so, it’s likely you haven’t tapped into your deepest potential, and unlocked your greatest ability to make work that means something.
If you’re in the abyss now, keep moving, pushing, creating, even when it feels pointless. Your abyss might take months, years, or decades to work through, but the strength you’ll find on the other side is equal to the trial.
The abyss is the only place to find the strength required to come back and create something that truly matters. The greatest mistake you can make is to avoid it.
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Belief Is Not Enough to Succeed
There’s a pernicious bit of advice that floats around the world of creative business. You commonly hear it in blogs, on podcast interviews with successful creative business owners, and from the stage at conferences.
It’s used to address podcasters, designers, photographers, videographers and pretty much any other type of freelancer or creative you can imagine.
But ubiquity does make it any truer.
The advice goes something like this: “If you have a dream that you truly believe in, that you’re deeply passionate about, and you work hard enough at it, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
But There’s a Problem Here
I think the problem stems from the fact that most of the people who are in a position to give this advice are currently living a life and excelling at a career that was once their own impossible dream. But they continued dreaming, made a plan and worked hard, and in the end, they realized it.
The thing is that they got lucky, on multiple fronts.
No doubt that they benefited from any combination of timing, existing skills, personal disposition and approach to facing challenges, their network and any host of other small but crucial opportunities, privileges, and chance that helped them achieve their goal.
But their biggest stroke of luck of all was the fact that their dream fit into an existing economic model.
Imagine you dreamed of working for yourself as a freelance graphic designer.
Especially if you didn’t go to design school, working for yourself, as a creative no less, might seem like an impossible dream.
You may not know any designers or even any freelancers personally, your family and friends might discourage you from taking the unnecessary risk of going into business for yourself, and let’s not even get into the imposter syndrome as someone who didn’t go to design school…
But at the same time, design is a thoroughly established profession with a deep pool of potential clients, educational resources, marketplaces to connect designers with clients, communities and associations to meet other designers, and on and on and on.
If your impossible dream was to work for yourself as a designer, you picked a pretty good impossible dream, and an entirely achievable one.
My Impossible Dream of World Travel
Five years ago when I first got started in business, I too had a very convenient “impossible dream”.
My dream was to start a business that would allow me to travel full-time and work from anywhere in the world.
Going in, I assumed that this might take five years to achieve, maybe even longer, and I was willing to work for it.
But a whole spate of fortuitous circumstances outside my control, including the rise of online business in general, podcasting in specific, and my latent audio engineering expertise (I was working full time as a landscaper at the time) meant that I was able to quickly tap into a fast-growing market and within nine months had achieved the goal I thought would take years to realize.
Not All Impossible Dreams Are Created Equal
Say for example that my dream, my one true calling, finally emerged in my mid-twenties to become a professional hockey player. If I began taking action immediately, I would be into my forties by the time I had caught up in experience-level to other players who were also competing to join the professional ranks, not to mention they would be entering their peak physical state, and I would be well into my own decline.
No matter how hard I dreamed or how hard I worked over that span, there is simply no way that I would or will ever become a pro hockey player.
I’ll admit, that’s an extreme example, so let’s look at one that’s much more common, and one that I see on an almost daily basis in the world of podcasting.
Can I Make a Living From My Podcast?
The podcast world is currently exploding. Every year sees more podcasts starting up, more big brands invest in the medium, and more advertising dollars pouring in.
As a result, a lot of people, including myself and our team at Counterweight Creative are currently benefiting from being in the industry.
When it comes to podcasters themselves, as you might imagine, most of that incoming capital is being focused on the existing big players, the NPRs and existing media companies of the world, as well as the up and coming first-movers in the space.
That said, there are thousands of indie podcasters who have managed to leverage their podcasts to do extremely well for themselves by building a raving fanbase and then creating products and services for that fanbase. This is what our team helps podcasters do.
But to say that all podcasters will or even can benefit from the explosion of the industry is to fall back into the same lie we kicked this article off with.
What most indie podcasters, bloggers and YouTubers don’t understand is that no matter how hard you work or how deeply you believe in your content, unless it is something that provides tangible value to a sufficient sized audience, you will not be able to make a living creating that content.
Your Niche Matters
We all have dreams of some form or another, and I believe that more often than not, it’s worth pursuing those dreams, even if we don’t always realize them.
While I believe deeply that there is joy and value in the journey of pursuing a dream, the danger is that you end up spending more time, money and heartbreak than you were willing to spend on a dream that was never viable from the start.
Yes realizing a dream requires commitment, belief, and hard work. But that’s not all it takes.
More often ignored by dreamers is the requirement of a receptive audience who understands what you’re doing and how it will benefit them to engage with your work.
This requirement often means you need some flexibility and compromise when it comes to what your dream scenario looks like in real life.
If your dream is to make a living podcasting, you have a pretty good chance of doing that if you put the work in.
Do some research to find an underserved niche, spend the next 6–12 months learning everything you can about it, and create a podcast teaching people what they want to know about the topic and create products and services that go more in-depth.
It wouldn’t be easy, it would take a lot of work, but there’s a well-trod path leading you there.
If, on the other hand, your dream is to make a living podcasting about your fascination with the lost artistic medium of linoleum flooring, you might have a much harder time building much of an audience, let alone monetizing your show…
No matter how excited you are linoleum, the world has moved on, and it’s unlikely you’re going to realize your dream.
Quality Matters
But let’s say your dream fits into a niche that does have an existing precedent for making a living off of it. In keeping with podcasting let’s say you want to start a comedy show with your friends.
There are certainly comedy podcasters out there that do really well for themselves, so you’ve ticked the first box.
But just because some people make a living creating the same thing you want to create, doesn’t mean that you are entitled to as well.
In the end, no matter how funny you and your friends think you are, that’s not what matters if your goal is to make a living creating your show.
For that to happen, your show needs to resonate with enough other people in such a way that you build a loyal audience around your work that has the potential to support you either by buying your products or by attracting advertisers.
This is what Seth Godin refers to as the smallest viable audience.
No matter how great your show might be either subjectively or even objectively, if the people who engage with it are unwilling to talk about it, share it with their friends, or engage further than an occasional listen, it’s either not good enough in terms of quality, or it is, but it’s not commercially viable content.
If this is the case, you have a couple options.
Resolving the Disconnects
If quality is the issue, you can put in the work to improve it. We’ve all heard the stories of the comedians who did three shows a night every weekend when they were starting out, playing hundreds of shows to near-empty rooms over the course of years before finally breaking through.
Have you put that kind of work into developing your craft?
There is so much competition in so many niches, industries, and professions that exceptional work is a requirement to even enter the conversation.
In addition to developing your skills, creatives often massively undervalue the importance of taking a proactive approach to networking, meeting the right people who are in a position to help mentor, guide, or otherwise aide on the road to realizing their dream.
Have you put in that kind of work?
For most people, achieving a dream is something that takes years of invested time to get to a level where it becomes a viable way to make a living. If you haven’t put in your time already, this should be your number one focus.
If quality is not the issue, but commercial viability is, you have the option of shifting your content to better fit into an existing commercial framework, one that potentially already has an audience that you can tap into.
The content you create or the work you perform for this audience might not be what you initially dreamt of doing, but maybe the trade-off is worth it to you.
When I first set out to start a business that would allow me to travel, I wanted to be a photography blogger. That didn’t end up working out for me, but something else came along that did, and I happily jumped at the opportunity.
The narrower your dream and the less compromise you’re willing to make, the harder it will be to achieve, if it’s possible at all.
A Third Option
Aside from putting in years of work to perfect your craft, and changing the nature of your work to better meet the market where it’s at, there is a third option when the work you care deeply about is not achieving the commercial success you hoped for.
You could decide that the work you create doesn’t need to achieve recognition, commercial success, or support you in order for it to fulfill you on a deeper level.
You could do your podcast about linoleum flooring simply because you find it fascinating, even if no one else does, and the podcast allows you to think about and appreciate it more deeply.
You could get together with your friends once a week and record your comedy podcast because it’s fun and allows you to share the experience of creating something with the people you care about. That in itself is such a rare and rich human experience that it should be cherished for what it is, rather than be a source of frustration for what it is not.
I could accept the fact that I’ll never play in the NHL and play pick-up hockey simply for the joy of connecting with other people in a friendly competition, and feeling of the magic of gliding effortlessly across the ice on a warm winter day out in the sun at the local rink.
No matter how hard you believe, and how hard you work, the world does not owe it to you to fulfill your dream. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take something deeply meaningful away from the pursuit in itself.
Is Your Work Really Good Enough?
You might have heard the rule that you need to put equal time into promoting and marketing your work as you do creating it.
Unless some incredible stroke of luck befalls you, no matter how good your work, podcast, book, or business is, you must be the one to exert the time and effort of getting it in front of the people it was created to help.
Like many creators, you might agree to this rule but not understand what effective marketing actually looks like, where you should be focusing your time and energy in promoting you work, and how you should best go about building authentic relationships and an audience around what you create.
You might have dabbled in promoting your work across a dozen different social media platforms, maybe guested on some podcasts, and even experimented with paid advertising, but never been able to see that effort translate into more podcast downloads, more blog page views, or more sales of your offer.
If you believe in your work and the content or offer you’ve created, you might come to the conclusion that your messaging or social media strategy is off, that if you could afford to spend thousands of dollars on ad experts, copywriters, and social media marketing managers your offer would surely take off.
While it might be true that your messaging is off, your copywriting is poor, and you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to paid advertising, before committing to spend your way to success (which probably won’t happen), you must first address the root of your marketing and ask yourself:
“Is my work really good enough?”
Assessing Your Offer
Too many people create something they’re in love with and assume that everyone else around them will see just as much value in it as they do.
They get it in front of ten, fifty, maybe a hundred people who should be interested in it, and when they’re met with muted response, assume that these people just don’t understand it yet, or that it’s a numbers game, and they simply must get their work in front of a greater pool of people.
Here’s the thing.
If you’ve presented your product, service, podcast, book, or offer of any other kind to ten people who you felt were the ideal target audience for that offer and not one had more than a passing interest in it, that’s a major problem.
If you’ve got your offer in front of a hundred people with the same result, you can be 99.9% certain, that no, your work is not, in fact, good enough.
Work that is at the level it truly needs to be at gets people talking about it without your prompt. They share it with friends who might benefit from it as well, they take the initiative of posting about it on social media.
Work that is good enough will spread on its own if you give it enough time, and marketing should only serve to accelerate the spread of a product or idea that is already proven to be worth your chosen audience talking about.
If you don’t have an offer worth talking about yet, that’s ok, it’s part of the process.
The products, services, and creations that are talked about most were engineered, sculpted and honed into what they are now based on constant feedback and iteration.
Your work should be no different.
If you’ve created something that’s not worth talking about, you’re on the right track. You’ve completed the initial brain dump, which can often be the hardest part.
If you believe in your offer, now is the time to experiment, tweak, cut away, add on, and constantly be asking for feedback from a core group of people for whom your work is intended to serve.
It can be scary asking for honest feedback from a small group of people. Marketing to the anonymous masses can be a way to shield yourself from the emotional labour involved with looking someone in the eye, presenting your creation, and being told that nope, sorry, I don’t see anything special here.
But if you’re going to build something that spreads, something that impacts and maybe even changes people, the only way is to find those first ten people and create something that is worth them talking about.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
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Find Your First Ten Fans
You have a big goal, a vision for how to make life better for a specific group of people.
That vision might be a refinement or improvement on the way things are currently done or a complete uprooting of the existing systems, structures, and beliefs of the people you’re looking to engage with.
Either way, it’s clear to you, at least, that your solution is the obvious choice to solve your audience’s problem, and you want to see your vision implemented on a massive scale for everyone your offer has the potential to help.
But how to get their attention and spread the word?
Your instinct is to get your hands on the biggest megaphone you can find and shout your message to the masses, confident that once your message is heard a queue of eager buyers will form engage with your offer, and a movement will be born.
Movements, however, are not built on megaphones, mass-marketing, and top-down messaging.
Movements are built by speaking intimately to a small group of people, and then creating something for them specifically, that they can’t help but tell their friends about.
If you choose to follow this path, the starting point is simple.
Find one person.
Find one person for whom your offer is the perfect solution for. If you can’t find one person, you most certainly won’t find a hundred, or a thousand, or a million.
Once you’ve found your one person, hone your product or service until it is the best possible solution for the problem they’re trying to solve.
Then find ten people and repeat the process.
Hone your work until you have something truly worth talking about, something that each of your ten people can’t help but share with three of their friends.
You don’t need to get your message, your product, your service in front of a million people. You simply need to find the perfect ten who will help you get the snowball rolling.
You won’t win by shouting louder than everyone else. You’ll win by creating raving fans who whisper among themselves and do your marketing for you.
Maintaining Motivation
If your goals are of sufficient depth and scale, measuring our progress towards them on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis can be difficult.
As a result, even if you are moving slowly, steadily, consistently forward, it can feel as though you’re stuck in place, motionless.
Starting a new business for the first time, doubling your existing business, or creating work that authentically moves people can feel like monumental tasks that don’t always have a clear roadmap.
Without a map, any forward motion you do have often feels like it might just be taking you in circles, not moving you any closer to your goal.
In these cases, it might be worth starting a “Success Journal”.
When you commit to writing down every success, every win, no matter how big or how small, the proof of your progress, slow though it may be, becomes apparent.
Momentum is essential to maintaining motivation, especially through The Dips that come with any project worth pursuing.
You might make note of each new best-yet daily page view total on your website, or downloads on your podcast.
You might note down every new email list subscriber, or keep a running tally of your social media following.
If you have a product or service you might note every sale or new customer.
Or, maybe you note every kind comment from someone who interacted with your work and appreciated it. Every connection your work facilitated, each new and fascinating person you would have never met if not for the work you did.
Over time, it might feel tedious to track each and every new subscriber, sale, or customer.
When that happens, recalibrate what it is you’re tracking and realize that this is as sure a sign as any that you’re on the right track, moving forward, building momentum.
Resistance and your brain’s negativity bias will do everything they can to keep you in place, feeling like the work is not worth doing, that it would be a waste of time to show up any bigger than you already are.
It’s up to you to stack the deck in your favour, to build up your armour, and to remind yourself that what you do has value, is connecting with people, and you have the proof.
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Care More
There are days when you feel like giving up.
Days when the pain of caring so much about the work you do, work that isn’t landing, isn’t connecting, isn’t making a difference, leaves you wanting to care less.
You feel that the hard days would be a little less hard if you didn’t take it all so personally.
That the criticism, and worse, the non-reaction would be a little easier to swallow if you didn’t have so much of yourself wrapped up in the work.
Into it, you’ve poured your time, labour, pain, hope, heart, soul, and shimmering belief for what the world could be.
Your work is the sum of your very best self, and when it fails to connect with someone, maybe with anyone, you’re left wondering what that says about you.
So yes, it might be easier, and less painful to pull back, to care less, and if you’re looking for an easy life, maybe that’s the best option.
But if you’re looking to make work that connects with, interacts with, and changes people — and I think you are — the easy road is not the one that will take you where you’re looking to go.
More than your time, labour, pain, hope, heart, soul and belief, your care is the biggest investment you can make in your work.
Without care, it all falls flat.
Rather than pull back when the pain of caring about work that isn’t connecting is almost too much, ask, “How can I care even more? What have I been holding back?”
Lean into and through the pain.
It means you’re onto something.
Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!
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Hi, I'm Jeremy, I'm glad you're here.
No matter what you create, I'm guessing you spend a good amount of time feeling lost, hopeless, and unsure about how to get from where you are to where you want to be.
So do I. And so does everyone doing creative work.
This is the Creative Wilderness.
Every week, I publish a new article in my Creative Wayfinding newsletter about how we as creators and marketers can navigate it with more clarity and confidence.
If you're building something that matters, but aren't quite sure how to take the next step forward, I'd be honoured to have you join us.